The thematic thrust of Nick Cave's second novel echoes the cover of the 2007 debut album from his side project Grinderman, except instead of a masturbating monkey this time the star is a frenziedly fornicating rabbit in human form. The Death of Bunny Munro is the sad, scuzzily hysterical tale of the titular door-to-door salesman, obsessed with sex, sex and more sex (Avril Lavigne's nether regions play a lurid supporting role throughout).

The Death of Bunny Munro is the sad, scuzzily hysterical tale of the titular door-to-door salesman, obsessed with sex, sex and more sex (Avril Lavigne's nether regions play a lurid supporting role throughout).

Bunny Munro's life rapidly unravels following his wife's suicide. Munro, saddled with his nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, who waits in the car while his father ever more desperately screws his way around the housing estates of Brighton, is an unforgettably foul creation.

As in song, Cave the novelist is unafraid to launch headlong into roaring caricature, but while the sex and death quotient is significant, the book also reveals surprising new weapons in his armoury, particularly the tenderness and humanity with which he portrays Bunny Junior, a beacon of love and faith in a ruined world. A final glimpse of redemption is offered, but the underlying themes are pure Faustus. Men fall prey to their own appetites and ludicrous self-delusions, doomed to damnation.

Told with verve, studded with scalding humour, this is considerably more accessible than Cave's first novel, 1989's Bible-black And the Ass Saw the Angel, closer in tone and content to Irvine Welsh's scabrous Filth. There are flaws, including a sub-plot about a horned serial killer murdering his way southward, from Gateshead to Brighton, which climaxes in a spot of symbolic sodomy, but they are minor. What lingers are the linguistic fireworks: the curtains hanging like "strips of uncooked meat"; the once totemic quiff that lies as "limp and insentient as roadkill".

The downloadable enhanced e-book features video clips, Cave's laconic narration and Warren Ellis's music, and will no doubt further enliven the engorged, vivid language. Whichever way you come to it, you'll struggle to think of Avril Lavigne in quite the same way again.